At the end of the movie version of “The Wizard of Oz,” Dorothy learns from the good witch Glinda that she can get back home simply by clicking together the heels of her ruby slippers. What if the link is broken? She must also express the wish to get back home. The link from Dorothy’s line, “There’s no place like home,” to its source, may for some viewers be broken. It was for this writer. It’s an old sentiment, no doubt linked even further away than this:
“Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam
Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home
A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there
Which seek thro’ the world, is ne’er met elsewhere
Home! Home!
Sweet, sweet home!
There’s no place like home
There’s no place like home!John Howard Payne, 1823, “Home, Sweet Home”
Blog links over time get broken, but you don’t know the link is broken until you click on it, resulting in reader frustration. Sources linked to get deleted, moved, paywalled – mysteriously disintegrate into the unfortunate 404 message, that what you’re looking for is not, down this passage, to be found. I don’t mind seeing links, and, in fact, often snap at them like a foraging fish, though links can be distracting, even if, maybe especially if, links go missing, and following links, one into another, one often wonders if one will ever get back home. I use fewer links than I once did. I’ve noticed readers don’t usually click my links anyway, assuming the stats catch such nibbles.
Speaking of stats, I would be remiss, as the rhetorical phrase goes, were I not to mention that the bots recently flooding the blog stats have disappeared. For the past six days running, the tidal wave of views has dropped, the tide receding to beachcombing depths. The statistical tinnitus, the buzzing and hissing of the bots, the grunion runs in high tides, has gone silent. Many thanks to what WordPress Happiness Wrangler figured out a solution.
There are also, of course, regarding missing links, connections that never actually existed, the friend, for example, that proves to be a missing link in one’s social chain-link fence. But who wants to be part of a chain-link fence? Or maybe that old friend simply drifted down river and out to sea. Those days you fell asleep in Grammar, and now you can’t recite, define, and give examples of the parts of speech, missing links in your learning. But in any case, the parts of speech have changed, the interjection now a missing link, while the comma can signal a missing link or itself be a missing link. A parenthesis unenclosed, dangling fore or aft; the shortstop who dropped the double play ball; the letters Salty wrote Penina – all missing links. Or the letter returned
“to sender, address unknown, no such number, no such zone.”
(from the Elvis song “Return to Sender,” Scott and Blackwell, 1962)
At the beginning of Faulkner’s novel “The Sound and the Fury,” Benjy watches the golfers “through the curling flower spaces.” The golf course was built on Benjy’s pasture, sold to afford a year at Harvard for his brother Quentin, and when Benjy hears the golfers call “Caddie!” it reminds him of his sister Caddy. The curling flower spaces are the twists and loops of steel wire, the links, repeating zigzag shapes, of the chain-link fence now bordering the remaining, diminished land and the golf course. Benjy’s non-linear memory is full of sensory, associative links. When a link is lost, as Caddy has been lost, he’s confused and disoriented, as we all are when what links us together and makes us whole is lost or broken.
The Coming of the Toads 